1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of application servers, and more particularly to a system and method for enabling atomic class loading in an application server environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
The field of application servers has recently become one of the fastest-growing and most important fields in the computing industry. As web applications and other distributed applications have evolved into large-scale applications that demand more sophisticated computing services, specialized application servers have become necessary, in order to provide a platform supporting these large-scale applications. Applications that run on application servers are generally constructed according to an n-tier architecture, in which presentation, business logic, and data access layers are kept separate. The application server space is sometimes referred to as “middleware”, since application servers are often responsible for deploying and running the business logic layer and for interacting with and integrating various enterprise-wide resources, such as web servers, databases, and legacy systems.
Application servers offer significant advantages over previous approaches to implementing web applications, such as using common gateway interface (CGI) scripts or programs. FIG. 1 illustrates a typical architecture for a web application utilizing CGI scripts or programs. The client computer running a web browser may reference a CGI program on the web server, e.g., by referencing a URL such as “http://server.domain.com/cgi-bin/myprogram.pl”. Generally, the CGI program runs on the web server itself, possibly accessing a database, e.g. in order to dynamically generate HTML content, and the web server returns the output of the program to the web browser. One drawback to this approach is that the web server may start a new process each time a CGI program or script is invoked, which can result in a high processing overhead, impose a limit on the number of CGI programs that can run at a given time, and slow down the performance of the web server. In contrast, application servers typically provide a means for enabling programs or program components that are referenced via a URL to run on a separate computer from the web server and to persist between client invocations.
Another common drawback of previous web application design models, such as the use of CGI programs, is related to data access. For example, if a CGI program needs to access a database, the program typically opens a database connection and then closes the connection once it is done. Since opening and closing database connections are expensive operations, these operations may further decrease the performance of the web server each time a CGI program runs. In contrast, application servers typically provide a means to pool database connections, thus eliminating or reducing the need to constantly open/close database connections. Also, data access in CGI programs is generally coded at a relatively low level, e.g., using a specific dialect of SQL to access a specific type of database. Thus, portions of the application may need to be recoded if the database is replaced with a new type of database. Application servers, on the other hand, may provide a database service for applications to utilize as an interface between the application and the database, which can serve to abstract the application from a particular type of database.
Application servers may also provide many other types of application services or may provide standard reusable components for tasks that web applications commonly need to perform. Application servers often incorporate these services and components into an integrated development environment specialized for creating web applications. The integrated development environment may leverage various standard software component models, such as the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), the (Distributed) Component Object Model (COM/DCOM), Enterprise JavaBeans™ (EJB), etc., or the integrated development environment may provide its own software component model or may extend standard component models in various ways.
The following list is a partial list of the types of application services or application components that application servers may provide. By leveraging these types of integrated, pre-built services and components, web application developers may realize a significant reduction in application development time and may also be able to develop a more robust, bug-free application. Application servers from different vendors differ, of course, in the types of services they provide; thus, the following list is exemplary only.                As noted above, application servers may provide data access services for accessing various types of databases, e.g. through directly supporting proprietary databases, such as SAP, Lotus Notes, CICS, etc., or through standardized interfaces, such as ODBC, JDBC, etc. Also, as noted above, application servers may enable database connection pooling or caching.        Application servers may also provide services for accessing network directories, such as directories that support the standard Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP).        Application servers may also provide application security services or components. Web application security may be considered at different levels, such as: client-to-server communication, application-level privileges, database access, directory service access, etc. Application server security-related services/components may include support for performing user authentication, performing data encryption, communicating via secure protocols such as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), utilizing security certificates, programming user access rights, integrating with operating system security, etc.        Application servers may also provide services enabling a web application to easily maintain user state information during a user session or across user sessions. Performing state and session management is especially important for applications that have complex, multi-step transactions.        Application servers may also support caching the results of application logic execution or caching the results of web page/component output, so that for appropriate subsequent requests, the results may be reused.        Application servers may also support result streaming, such as dynamically streaming HTTP output, which may be especially useful for large result sets involving lengthy queries. A related service may enable an application to easily display a large result set by breaking the result set down into smaller groups and displaying these groups to the user one at a time.        Many web applications need to perform various types of searching or indexing operations. Application servers may also provide application services for indexing or searching various types of documents, databases, etc.        As noted above, many web applications may perform various types of complex, multi-step transactions. Application servers may also provide support for managing these application transactions. For example, this support may be provided via a software component model supported by the application server, such as the Enterprise JavaBeans™ component model, or via integration with third-party transaction process monitors, etc.        It is often desirable to enable web applications to perform certain operations independently, as opposed to in response to a user request. For example, it may be desirable for an application to automatically send a newsletter to users via email at regularly scheduled intervals. Application servers may support the creation and scheduling of events to perform various types of operations.        Many types of web applications need to perform e-commerce transactions, such as credit card transactions, financial data exchange, etc. Application servers may provide services for performing various types of e-commerce transactions or may provide an integrated third-party e-commerce package for applications to use.        Web applications often need to utilize various types of standard network application services, such as an email service, FTP service, etc. Application servers may provide these types of services and may enable applications to easily integrate with the services.        Web applications often need to log various conditions or events. Application servers may provide an integrated logging service for web applications to use.        
Judging by the exemplary list above of computing services that application servers may provide for web applications, it is apparent that application servers may integrate a diverse range of services, where these services may interact with many different types of servers, systems, or other services. For example, an application server may act as a platform hub connecting web servers, database servers/services, e-commerce servers/services, legacy systems, or any of various other types of systems or services. A key benefit of many application servers is that they not only provide this service/system integration, but typically also provide centralized administrative or management tools for performing various aspects of system and application administration.
For example, application servers may provide management tools related to application development and deployment, such as tools for source code control and versioning, bug tracking, workgroup development, etc. Application servers may also provide tools related to application testing and deployment, such as tools for application prototyping, load simulation, dynamic code base updates, etc. Application servers may also provide tools for easily configuring the application to utilize various of the application server services described above. For example, administrators may use a tool to set the result caching criteria for particular application components or pages, or may use a tool to specify which documents to index or to specify indexing methods, etc.
One important class of application server administrative tools pertains to real-time application management and monitoring. Application servers may provide tools for dynamically managing various factors affecting application performance, e.g. by adjusting the application services and support features described above. For example, application server tools may allow administrators to:                dynamically adjust the number of database connections maintained in a database pool, in order to determine the optimum pool size for maximum performance        clear or resize application output caches        dynamically change various aspects of system or application security        schedule or trigger events, such as events for sending e-mail reports to application users, generating reports based on collected data, etc.        start and stop various application services, such as email or FTP services, from a centralized user interfaceThis list is, of course, exemplary, and particular application servers may support different types of centralized application management.        
In addition to the factors discussed above, many application servers also include means for providing various types of system reliability and fault tolerance. One common technique related to fault tolerance is known as application server “clustering”. Application server clustering refers to tying together two or more application servers into a system. In some cases, this “tying together” may mean that application code, such as particular software components, is replicated on multiple application servers in a cluster, so that in the case of a hardware or software failure on one application server, user requests may be routed to and processed by other application servers in the cluster.
Application server clustering may also facilitate application performance and scalability. Application servers may be added to a cluster in order to scale up the available processing power by distributing work. Advantageously, application servers often enable this type of scaling up to be down without requiring changes to the application code itself.
Work may be distributed across an application server cluster in different ways. For example, as discussed above, application code may be replicated across multiple application servers in the cluster, enabling a given request to be processed by any of these multiple application servers. Also, application code may be logically partitioned over multiple servers, e.g., so that a particular application server is responsible for performing particular types of operations. This type of application partitioning may help application performance in various ways. For example, application partitioning may reduce the need for an application server to perform context switching between different types of operations, such as CPU-intensive operations versus input/output-intensive operations. Also, application partitioning may be used to match application processing to various physical characteristics of a system, such as network characteristics. For example, data-intensive application logic may be configured to run on an application server that is closest to a data source, in order to reduce the latencies associated with accessing remotely located data.
In the case of application code replication, where multiple application servers are capable of processing a given request, it is often desirable to route the request to the “best” application server currently available to process the request, i.e., to the application server that will enable the request to be processed and the request results to be returned to the client as quickly as possible. This mapping of client requests to application servers is known as application server load balancing.
In many cases, it is necessary or desirable to enable administrators to update a set of classes atomically, i.e., to have changes made to a set of classes take effect at the same time in the application server runtime environment. Without an ability to perform atomic class-loading, errors may result when classes are dynamically reloaded.